Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Posts under this category are about the more interesting hubs that I have written over at HubPages. To date, I have about 30 hubs over there with plans for many more.

Just a short recap, HubPages is a website that allows you to publish your own articles on their site. These articles will be on a single webpage and are called hubs. You can generally publish anything you want there, with the usual limitations.

The difference between this site and other article directory is that it is setup so that you can easily interact with the other writers or hubbers. In my opinion, it is this interaction that distinguishes HubPages from Squidoo or the other article directories.

I wrote an earlier post about HubPages when I just started with it which goes into a little more detail.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a unexceptional area of the night sky taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It revealed nearly 10,000 galaxies. It has been described by one author as "single most important picture ever taken by humanity".

It instills in one a sense of humility and wonder at the grand scale of it all.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

I just got a FaceBook profile! I know, I know, where have I been? Well, it's just that I got serious about this Internet thing just a few months ago and I normally take the time to explore each social network before moving on to the next.

Fact of the matter is that each and every social network has its own special characteristics, and by being very familiar with each one, you know how to use it to your maximum advantage. Takes a little bit of time, but I think that in the long run, it will pay off handsomely.

Another advantage of concentrating on one network at a time is that when you start your next network, you already have a following in your previous network which will help in building your new network. :)

One of the networks that I'm in right now is Twitter, a microblogging network great for making first contact and for interacting with people you will probably not get a chance to meet in real life. Do join me on Twitter.

The other network is HubPages. It's not exactly a social network. It has the characteristics of social networking, article marketing, blogging and Internet marketing all rolled into one.

Anyway, my intention for this new FaceBook profile is for friends, networking and Internet marketing partnerships. Not sure yet in what form, or what manner I will go about achieving all this, but I invite you to be my friend and we can explore together. I'll see you over at Facebook.

Friday, April 17, 2009

I checked today and the page rankings have gone down! Every page listed at the beginning of this thread has no page rank, except for 2 pages - one is ranked 0 and the other is ranked 3!

I thought that the common preception is that page rank does not change, except during Google updates, which happens only a few times a year. Apparently, this seems to be wrong.

Anyway, I don't think this is worth exploring any further. I don't place a very high value on page rank and it does seem like getting a page to rank PR2 or above seems relatively simple. I might try to do a more controlled test on this on another ocassion, but I will do it on another thread.

One last thing - my home business site is linking to this site through a dynamic link, which might explain the drop in PR.

And the hub above is more frequented than the other hubs. The key here might be links from other sites through RSS. The hub that has the most comments, the hub above, would appear more in RSS and might just have more sites linking to it.

Which leads to 2 questions:- When a hub is updated, does the information go out through RSS?- When comments are posted to a hub, does the information also go out through RSS?

I suspect the answer to the first is yes. I have seen hubs with no traffic at all, get a trickle after I make a change.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Remember when I listed the page rank of some of my other pages on other sites? At that time, every single one of those pages were not ranked. I checked just now and guess what? Some of my pages from HubPages did not read not ranked.

I checked the PR of this blog as well, and it is now PR2! It was previously not ranked.

Not sure why the page rank changed but this Google and SEO game is starting to look not that difficult. And the change in the PR of this blog is especially intriguing as I had done no promotion except for more regular posting.

I wonder if that's the key. As far as I know, every time I post, this infomation is fed to other sites. I believe they call it "ping". I don't know if this happens when I edit a post. I wonder if the exact mechanics of this is worth looking into.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Well, I didn't get around to updating the title and description for my whole site. I am planning to do a complete revamp in the near future and don't think that it's worth the trouble. For a few pages, I did change it but for the rest, I actually left out the title and description so that Google is forced to look into the site for the description.

I did a Google search using the "site:" operator for my domain. Well, some pages have been updated and some have not been.

Remember the search in part 1 for "we live in an impatient society"? I did the search again. Before the change, my site was in 27th spot, after the change, it was nowhere to be found!

This is an interesting result. In the first place, the phrase as a random phrase and really did not have much business to be up there. But it was.

Then, when the title and description was changed to more fully reflect the content of the page, the page disappeared from the search results for that phrase.

To be complete, I searched for the same phrase in double quotes and found the page. I checked and found that the page rank of the page is still not ranked.

The fact that the page was ranked relatively high in the first instance probably has something to do with the PR4 of the domain. When the title and description were changed, there may have been a "decoupling", in Google's eyes.

Anyway, interesting piece of information. I have no plans to test this further but it certainly might come in handy in the future.